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Partnership ProgrammesPartnership Programmes
Discover-NOW
Following the conî¶²rmation of funding by NHS England for the development of a London-wide SDE,
Discover-NOW is being scaled London-wide to create a linked primary and secondary care record for
the 10 plus million patients registered in the î¶²ve London Integrated Care Systems (ICS), creating a truly
unique SDE available for research and development. Discover-NOW also has plans to scale its operational
service oî ¥er to the whole of London. A series of stakeholder interviews, public deliberations, and cross-
workstream workshops will take place to ensure co-design of the new Discover-NOW service oî ¥er and
underpinning commercials. The Hub aims to continue our successful collaboration with partners around
AI, real world trials, retrospective analyses and population health management project, while also
exploring a self-service or direct access model.
The Hub continues to be a resourceful asset to research active institutions and commercial organisations.
To date, over 300 data access applications have been completed for Discover-NOW. Other work includes:
• Supporting high impact projects including the development of the London Asthma Decision Support
tool (LADS). This combines asthma population, clinical care, î¶²nancial and wider determinants of
health data (including air quality data) from across two London ICS. This tool is being used across NWL
to support clinical and î¶²nancial decision making for precision care planning from practice to ICB level
and has been submitted for a HSJ transformation award.
• Investigating survival and health economic outcomes in heart failure diagnosed at hospital admission
versus community settings found that diagnosis of heart failure through hospital admission continues
to dominate and is associated with signiî¶²cantly greater short-term risk of mortality. This work was
published in BMJ Health and Care Informatics.
• The NWL Health Research Register, which consents patients for contact about future research
opportunities, has achieved 80,000 sign-ups, which is increasingly being used for commercial clinical
trials and is recognised as a quicker way of î¶²nding and referring patients.
Meanwhile, a priority for the business development team is to engage with current partners and
reach out to additional organisations in the health technology, pharmaceutical, consultancy, Contract
Research Organisation, and academic spaces, to not only make them aware of the potential plans and
oî ¥ers of Discover-NOW, but to derive insights around the needs and requirements of these key partners
for delivering high impact health projects. The Hub has become an alliance partner with the Paddington
Life Sciences Group and have ringfenced NHSE SDE funding to create an important collaboration with
the Kings College AI Centre around imaging data. Based upon recent contracts, potential use cases
include the deployment of a medical history model to determine risk of future health complications,
patient identiî¶²cation and recruitment for a cardiovascular metabolic trial, retrospective analysis of a
CVD patient pathway, eî ¥ectiveness of a medical device supported with AI, and a medicine proî¶²ling and
optimization study.
DATAMIND
The Data Hub for Mental health INformatics research Development (DATAMIND) aims to advance mental
health research through a step change in the visibility and accessibility to NHS, administrative and
longitudinal data. This will be achieved through greater discoverability, annotation, harmonisation, and
advanced analytics by ensuring the inclusion of diverse groups of under-represented individuals with the
greatest clinical need.
The Hub has focused on four core activity areas and has also identiî¶²ed four challenge areas that have
guided research. These are: Children and Young People, Excluded and Underrepresented Groups,
Interfaces between Physical and Mental Health, and Severe Mental Illness (SMI). Speciî¶²cally building
on the MRC Pathî¶²nder community, the Hub has also been working on six identiî¶²ed Road Builder
Innovations which are being delivered at diî ¥erent Milestones over the course of the project. These will
potentially become Hub Core Activities over time, working across and extending further into Challenge
Areas. The Road Builder Innovations are:
• Discoverable Schools.
• Discoverable excluded and under-served groups.
• Linking Physical and mental health in SMI.
• Widening availability of mental health care text analytics capabilities.
• Digitally Enhanced Trials.
• Drug discoverability.
To date, the DATAMIND team has focused on workshops and the identiî¶²cation of training needs for
early career researchers, followed by provision of courses. The data literacy course has been developed
alongside our PPIE group to develop the capacity of people with lived and living experience of mental
health in Mental Health Data Science research. This online course will be released soon. There is an
extensive range of tools being developed to support a range of research needs: Core Mental Health
DataSet (CMHDS) collection tool; equity audit tool for clinical trials; Mental Health Text Analytics Cloud
(MH-TAC); VELA tool to simplify information extraction from large, linkable, mental health data sources;
and PHENOMIND for making phenotype library code lists and algorithms available for research data.
The partnership with the National Institute for Health Research Clinical Research Network (NIHR CRN) is
important for widespread uptake.
There are eî ¥orts to integrate the Catalogue of Mental Health Measures and Landscaping International
Longitudinal Data project with the Innovation Gateway. The Welsh work on hard-to-reach groups shows
real value of diî ¥erent types of data assets, and it is good to see that the Natural Language Processing
work is being built out. The Hub established an Industry Forum to connect DATAMIND with several
industries, including the pharmaceutical sector, to explore the possibility of developing work that would
address mental health needs. During these discussions, various gaps in the î¶²eld have been identiî¶²ed
such as the possibility of using genomic data collected as part of a pharma-sponsored clinical trial to
understand how antidepressants work and why they work better for some people than for others. This
also led to the application of a Wellcome Trust call which was awarded in December 2022, contributing to
the sustainability of DATAMIND. Overall, the Hub is showing excellent progress and integration with other
work/investments.
Over the next six months, the Hub will continue to expand its online presence with its website. Two key
additions that will be added to the DATAMIND website are an online data literacy course developed in
collaboration with McPin, DATAMIND, and the Super Research Advisory Group (SRAG), covering topics
like patient rights, research, and risks. Additionally, the DATAMIND glossary, created with assistance
from the PPIE team, will provide easily understandable explanations of essential terms in mental health
research and data analysis, fostering eî ¥ective communication and collaboration among stakeholders.
The DATAMIND PPIE group will continue their involvement in co-producing and developing guidelines
and strategies related to privacy and data sharing and other ongoing documents to aid the î¶²eld of mental
health and its community, including industry. The next Industry Forum will be held late in 2023 with PPIE
for them to engage directly with industry partners. The next data science events are also in preparation
for late 2023 and will incorporate the feedback received from early career researchers and attendees
of previous workshops. They will also focus on working with HDR UK Futures and the MQ Mental
Health Research charity for engagement opportunities and to develop training modules for Continuing
Professional Development-style-learning. Work continues to onboard datasets through the Gateway.